According to McKinsey, generative AI is expected to deliver US$4.4 trillion ($5.63 trillion) in economic benefits annually when used across industries. Adoption of the technology, however, has been hindered by limited IT resources and skills as well as concerns about data governance, privacy and AI ethics.
Tech companies are incorporating generative AI into their solutions to help organisations embrace the technology at scale for operational efficiency. Oracle recently launched over 50 role-based AI agents within the Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite. They can automate end-to-end business processes and deliver personalised insights and recommendations in the context of specific business processes and user roles.
The new AI agents in Oracle Fusion Applications are designed to support finance, supply chain, HR, sales, marketing, and service teams. They include:
- Benefits analyst to help streamline access to employee benefits and enable employees to better understand and optimise their benefits packages based on their individual needs;
- Maintenance troubleshooting adviser that can accelerate maintenance and expedite repairs by delivering personalised and contextual insights and recommendations for asset maintenance and repairs;
- Advanced prediction agent, which helps organisations support multivariate AI prediction models, leveraging financial, operational as well as external factors in predictive forecasting;
- Contracts researcher agent that enables sales teams to automate routine contract workflows and approvals (such as contract authoring and renewals process) so they can focus on selling rather than administrative tasks.
“Including generative AI into our applications makes them more powerful, intuitive, and cost-effective, [which ultimately helps organisations] scale their use of AI to drive digital transformation,” says Sunil Wahi, Oracle’s vice president of Apac solution engineering for applications. He was speaking at a media briefing on the sidelines of Oracle CloudWorld 2024 in Las Vegas last month.
He continues: “Offering generative AI as a feature instead of a bolt-on also helps organisations eliminate technical debt and prevent siloed initiatives. Moreover, the move helps address the skills shortage, which continues to be a huge issue in Southeast Asia. By automating mundane tasks [through generative AI and other ways], workers can focus on more strategic tasks.”
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Bringing AI and cloud to data
AI needs infrastructure, database and applications to deliver value, shares Chris Chelliah, senior vice-president of technology and customer strategy for Oracle Japan and Asia Pacific, at the same media briefing. However, Southeast Asian organisations are struggling to balance those AI requirements with data governance and compliance.
“To remove the barriers of AI adoption, we’re bringing AI and cloud services to your data, no matter where the data resides. That’s an easier, safer and more cost-effective approach than the current way of moving your data to AI models or cloud platforms,” says Chelliah.
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He continues: “We recognise that organisations will not stick with one cloud platform/provider [as they want the flexibility to use the right cloud solution for their different workloads]. However, connecting multiple clouds is complex as each cloud provider has its own terms. [This is why we’ve designed] Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to help organisations easily combine cloud services from multiple clouds to optimise cost, functionality, and performance.”
Today, organisations can gain direct access to Oracle Database services running on OCI and deployed directly in the data centres of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure and Google Cloud. They can, therefore, run their applications across clouds and combine the benefits of Oracle Database services with services from other cloud providers for a seamless multi-cloud experience.
For instance, they can seamlessly connect enterprise data in Oracle Database to applications running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), AWS Analytics services, or AWS’s advanced AI and machine learning services. This enables them to benefit from the simplicity, security, and low latency of a unified operating environment.
Data sovereignty
Stringent data sovereignty regulations in the Asia Pacific region are driving the need for local data centres to ensure compliance with privacy laws. Oracle Alloy enables service providers, integrators, independent software vendors, and other organisations like telecommunications providers to become cloud providers that address data sovereignty needs.
Alloy is a platform offering more than 100 infrastructure and platform services available in OCI’s public cloud. With Alloy, partners can offer a full set of cloud services and package additional value-added services and applications to meet the specific needs of their markets and industry verticals. They can also use Oracle Alloy independently in their data centres and fully control their operations to help address specific regulatory requirements.
Fujitsu, for example, will deploy Oracle Alloy as part of its Fujitsu Uvance Hybrid IT portfolio, which supports organisations with on-premises and cloud-based infrastructure. It will operate Alloy independently in its data centres in Japan to have transparency and control over its operations, including OCI services, says Kazushi Koga, Fujitsu’s corporate executive officer and senior executive vice-president, head of system platform. As such, highly regulated businesses — like banks, transport and utility companies — and the public sector can confidently utilise sovereign cloud infrastructure and sovereign AI directly from data centres operated by Fujitsu in Japan.
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New ways of defending the cloud
Cybersecurity is another concern when it comes to multi-cloud, as the use of various cloud platforms and services means bad actors have potentially more points of entry.
“Clever cybercriminals are invading your computers and walking away with your data… and the situation is worsening. If we’re going to do a really good job of defending our networks and computer systems and stopping data and identity theft, we need to exploit the most advanced technologies to defend ourselves. And those advanced technologies are AI,” Larry Ellison, Oracle’s chairman and chief technology officer, tells the audience at the event.
The Oracle APEX low-code development platform, for instance, uses AI to help protect applications from the start of their development, as poorly written code can cause security vulnerabilities. Ellison claims the security benefits that APEX brings are even more important than the 10-time productivity gains the platform delivers by writing the code.
Network security is another complex cloud security issue. According to Ellison, configuring a network presents two competing goals: maximising speed, performance and reliability on the one hand, and protecting data on the other. Therefore, there is a need to separate network configuration from security, and the OCI Zero Trust Packet Routing (OCI ZPR) delivers that.
With AI-powered OCI ZPR, network administrators can solely focus on configuring and reconfiguring their enterprises’ networks to optimise performance. They can write policies in natural language that limit network traffic based on the resources and data services that need to be accessed. ZPR then generates the code by which autonomous robots inspect every packet through the network to ensure they are not going where they do not belong.
